By Jennifer Boykin of Life After Tampons
Last winter I ran away from home. Well, sort of. It was a planned run. Everyone knew where I was going. (The Hampton Inn an hour from my house.) And when I’d be back. (Two days.) I made sure there were groceries in the house and that the kids would be able to get where they needed to go while I was gone. I also made sure to spend extra time with my new husband both before and after I went. But, in my mind, I was running away.
My plan was to write about my life, or write a book, or accidentally be discovered by someone connected to Oprah.
In spite of my unrealistic plan to write my Magnum Opus, I was so depleted, I couldn’t think or write in complete sentences. So instead, I ate waffles. And went shopping at Kohl’s. I took naps, painted my nails, had a chocolate malt, and bought a few hundred index cards. Although I couldn’t write complete sentences, I could record the random grunts that came to me on 3 by 5 inch scraps. I ate another Shrimp Caesar at Outback, bought some urban black boots, took a nap, and then coughed up a few more ideas.
And then, I started sorting. As I picked up each little scrap of my Inner Knowing, patterns started to emerge. I took a nap, and then looked at the piles again. I ate some chocolate, gathered those pieces and sorted again. Now the patterns started to point themselves in a new path. And I could see what I needed to do.
I was pretty exhausted from doing stuff that was expected of me, so I NEEDED TO START BY STOPPING. I needed to STOP doing what didn’t feed my soul and START doing what did. Sounds simple, right? Well, not so much, it seems.
I’ve Been Asleep!
Thirty years ago, when I was just starting out, I thought I would conquer the world. I was a really strong student and had years of training as a classical flautist. The naiveté of youth fueled by a million rum and cokes convinced me I would take the world by storm! I had some fun, dated, got married, had babies, made mac and cheese, discussed the color and consistency of poopy diapers – you get the point.
I take my adult responsibilities very seriously. And, like every other woman I know, I lost myself to those responsibilities and didn’t look up again for years. Every so often during this period, I would circle back to my youthful “take the world by storm” dreams. I would start something just my own. But then life would rear its ugly head, and I THOUGHT I had to put my dreams on the back burner. Eventually, it made me too sad to see what I was neglecting back there. So, I stopped looking.
The Turning Point
Sometime in those two days at the Hampton Inn, I decided that, not only was I going to look again, I was going to commit to a whole-scale revision of my life. This was going to be the year when I ruthlessly cut out everything that wasn’t in alignment with who I knew myself to be. But then another problem presented itself.
It seems that after spending so many years doing what I was “supposed” to do, I had lost track of who I had become. There was no longer a “me” to come home to. The advice I got was, “begin with what you like,” but even that was tricky and mysterious. Sometime over the intervening years, the things that used to make my heart sing had lost their magic. So I began by cutting out what I knew I didn’t like. And then I sat still with the vacuum that that created.
Eventually, a new dream began to crystallize. I could see a way to combine all of my life experiences into a new vision and dream that would not only embrace the woman that I had become, but would also help other women who had also lost themselves to their responsibilities.
On February 1, I launched my new MidLife Reinvention movement, Life After Tampons. My hope is that we can rebrand MidLife as a time of passion, purpose, power, and possibility.
It seems that, in running away from home, I was actually running home to myself.
Jane Gassner
